Music Industry Newswire has a highly experienced team of editors and working journalists who manage the content found in this online music news magazine.
Meet our Team:
• Christopher Laird Simmons
Christopher Simmons is one of those folks sometimes referred to as a “renaissance man” because of his many interests and his ability to be both an artist and a businessman by switching hats as necessary. Similarly, he has been at the forefront of numerous movements combining the arts and technology over the past 25 years.
His various hats have included direct marketing, art direction, illustration, journalism, music, photography, publishing, public relations, video editing, and Web development. He has been a non-stop entrepreneur since his teens — his first successful venture was a mail-order business selling movie memorabilia around the world at the age of 16.
He has composed music themes for two cable TV programs, including the award-winning VidKidCo, produced by the Long Beach Museum of Art’s Video Annex. As a musician he performed in several bands in the ‘80s, including “Pets Gone Wild” ( www.petsgonewild.com ) that was featured in the L.A. Times Calendar section, and was an L.A. Weekly “band name of the week.” He released numerous independent self-produced albums of electronic music in the ‘80s under the name “Bluetoy,” which were played widely on late-night alternative music radio shows, and reviewed favorably in music magazines like Electronic Musician. He re-mastered and re-released the albums on CD under his own name between 1996 and 2000 (his CD Beserker is available on iTunes, CDbaby, Amazon.com).
He has also been on the launch team of numerous successful companies including MacMall, FindWhat.com (now MIVA), and Send2Press® Newswire.
He has developed over 500 Web sites since March of 1995, including e-commerce projects for Oprah Winfrey and the No Fear clothing company, and an online 10-hour e-learning video course for DentalHygieneReview. He is also considered one of the first “experts” in search engine optimization (SEO), creating a proprietary technology called ContextEngine® in 1996 which has evolved over the past decade along with search engines to help Web sites rank higher and “be found.”
He has art directed numerous magazines, and was the Chief Creative at the PhotoVentures ad agency from 1982-1987. He has won two Harvey Measurement awards for most responsive magazine advertising, and an ARPL design award from Apple Computer in 1993.
He wrote one of the first magazine articles on using MIDI sequencing with a Commodore 64, and Sequential Circuits interface in the June 1984 issue of Polyphony (now Electronic Musician). As one of the first proponents of e-book technology in the publishing and advertising worlds, he published an electronic magazine (“e-zine”) of fiction and pop-culture called Nu*Real in the Common Ground format in Dec. of 1994 that was available for download on AOL and Internet news groups.
He has written for a wide variety of national and regional print publications including Computer Player, CrossMedia, Digital Imaging, Print on Demand Business, Micro Publishing News, Polyphony, Search Engine Intelligence, and Spazz. His business articles on graphic design and Web development were also reprinted by the Graphic Artist Guild in several issues of their member newspaper. As the founder of a small publishing company (Mindset Press, now Neotrope Press), he developed over thirty small press publications and “fanzines” between 1987 and 1990, including one that was featured in the “potpourri” section of Playboy magazine.
He has been widely interviewed by publications like PC World on Linux Web hosting (he operated a Web hosting business from 1997 to 2005), TrendWatch on PDF technology, twice by Entrepreneur magazine on PR and marketing, and been invited to speak at Seybold, and the annual meeting of the American Intellectual Property Law Association, among others. He has been interviewed numerous times for Internet radio and Podcast programs over the past six years related to public relations and Internet marketing topics.
He is the president and founder of Neotrope® which is involved in entertainment, marketing and PR; both online and in traditional venues. He is a current member of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). As a public relations (PR) professional he works with companies of all sizes to help them “get ink” in the media and promote their brands and products. He has also served on the panel of judges for the PRSA Excellence in Tech Journalism Awards (2002, 2003, 2004 awards).
• Scott G (aka “The G-Man”)
Scott G owns G-Man Marketing, (www.gmanmarketing.com/) an advertising and communiations firm in Los Angeles. If you have opened a newspaper, flipped through a magazine, or listened to the radio in the past two decades, your purchasing decisions have been influenced by his work.
Mr. G has created advertising campaigns for hundreds of clients, and most recently has written/produced radio commercials and corporate broadcasts for such as Goodrich, General Dynamics NASSCO, Verizon Wireless, Yale Hospital, American Cancer Society, DIRECTV, Micron, Legoland, the Auto Club and many more.
He is also the recording artist known as The G-Man, with his albums distributed by Delvian Records and available on Rhapsody and iTunes. He’s a voting member of NARAS (the Grammy organization) and regularly writes about communications, marketing and advertising for many publications and Web sites.
• Jesse JJ Jame
JJ Jame is a percussionist and theramin player, formerly a member of the Redondo Beach, California based BoyRacer™ electronica band (no relation to the European band of same name), and a long-time electronic music blogger, formerly an editor for the defunct EMcult™ website.
• Liisa “S”
Liisa (yes, spelled correctly!) writes for several national and regional magazines; daily and weekly newspapers; and business-to-business newsletters. Before joining the Send2Press News Network, she worked as an editor for a national medical publishing company where she managed a team of writers and did market research for new launches. Liisa also worked in the catering business for several years, and as a result, specializes in writing about the food and beverage business and has two monthly columns that feature chefs and wine experts.
Liisa received her Masters in Media Studies from the New School for Social Research in New York City and is currently a member of the Public Relations Association of Western North Carolina. She resides in the beautiful town of Asheville, NC in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains; she lives there with her husband, Bryan and Black lab, Annie.